The bibliometric impact of books published by the International Consortium on Landslides

Abstract

Dissemination of research results is an important part of basic as well as applied research if not the most important one. A large part of research results is published in scientific literature, and since there are many forms of it, the question arises which form is the most visible and attractive to the world scientific community. The International Consortium on Landslides (ICL), based in Kyoto, Japan, is one of the leading institutions in the field of landslide research and landslide risk reduction. On behalf of ICL, Springer Nature has published the journal Landslides: Journal of the International Consortium on Landslides since 2004. It is a very successful scientific journal with regard to its scientometric parameters. Since January 2018, it has been a monthly journal published in full color in electronic as well as printed form. Another form of dissemination of the ICL scientific and professional activities are published books in the form of monographs and proceedings from triennial World Landslide Forums. This paper discusses the impact of 52 books with 3426 chapters taken from the field of landslide science and published by Springer Nature from 2005 to 2018 in the earth sciences category, using different scientometric parameters, such as Bookmetrix downloads and citations, Scopus citations, Scopus h-index, Google citations, and Google h-index. The analysis was performed on the book chapter level (using mainly citations as the main scientometric parameter) as well as on the book level (using book h-index and percentage of cited chapters). Out of the selected 52 titles, 22 were published on behalf of the ICL, with 1419 chapters. The differences among landslide-related books can be quite large; only a few chapters from analyzed book titles were found to be cited frequently compared to highly cited scientific journal articles. On average, the analyzed 3426 book chapters from 52 landslide-related books have been downloaded since publication over 53,000 times each; 1092 chapters (32%) received 2932 citations (2.68 citations per cited chapter and 0.86 citations per published chapter). The analysis shows that the books published on behalf of the ICL are, together with other landslide-related book titles, on the forefront in the Springer eBook collection Earth and Environmental Science (EES). The selected 52 landslide-related book titles are above the average metrics for the whole EES with regard to the total number of downloads per book, the total number of citations per book, and the total number of readers per book. The ICL-related books are getting more downloads but less readers and citations (so far) as the selected non-ICL-related books. A way in raising the visibility and impact of the ICL books on landslide research community would be to support their open access publication in the form of eBooks as much as possible, and inclusion of ICL books into Web of Science.

International Programme on Landslides—A Short Overview of Its Historical Development

“…Normally, it attracts 500 + participants from all over the world, and the wealth of knowledge exchange among the participants was widely available to all stakeholders as published contributions in the WLF Proceedings. The outreach of these publications can be evaluated as solid if measured with bibliometric indices (Mikoš 2018). The last WLF5 in Kyoto, Japan published its reviewed contributions in the ICL Contribution to Landslide Disaster Risk Reduction book series in six volumes under the title "Understanding and Reducing Landslide Disaster Risk".…”

“…This was associated with an annual conference called the IPL Symposium on Landslides (ICL 2018a). The proceedings of the recent conferences in years 2017, 2018, and 2019 are available in the pdf format on the web (Sassa and Dang 2017, 2018. The event is an occasion for ICL members to:…”

Sediment organic carbon and heavy metals: A bibliometric analysis

“…This is reflected in 64.5 folds increase in publication on SOC and 11.8 folds increased publication on SHM as journal articles in comparison to their respective conference proceedings. Previous reports have also indicated that the low citation rate of conference proceedings is an inhibitory factor that discourages researchers to publish topics of global importance in conference proceedings (Mikos, 2018).…”